I just looked at an image from when Spirit was on top of Husband Hill... How clean she was back then

So I made this gif to show the current dust buildup

A breath of wind could be used indeed

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"I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really like" - Steven Squyres

Here’s a Q&D pan from the 4/15/06 (Sol 811) pancam directory of exploratorium - a look toward Husband Hill and the edge of HP. There’s an interesting spot in the tracks here (second image below) where it looks as if the right front wheel may have failed to rotate momentarily, a few meters before it failed completely. Maybe, maybe not... it could just be a patch of soft-dust-ridge the wheels went through, and it does have some cleat marks, however they aren’t uniform.

By the looks of the soil you are using images from different filters. I think it might be more accurate to use images taken though the same filter.

It's two navcam images So no filter issues.

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"I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really like" - Steven Squyres

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You ought to consider programming a 'hot key' for this reply. But I seriously worry that we may be getting more and more anxious for ANY sort of wind event as the months wear on at Low Ridge. Dust strangulation would be a particularly agonizing way for Spirit to go.

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My Grandpa goes to Mars every day and all I get are these lousy T-shirts!

I can see how and why it started - but the relation between cleaning and dust devils is simply that summer has stronger winds, and the summer also has more DD's. The connection is also furthered by the fact that we were in a topographically adventagous place during the summer.

In case you haven't seen it, a new rover update was posted on the marsrovers website HERE, dated the 14th. The 'news' is that the increase in power is, "50 to 60 watt-hours per sol" - which only "gives the rover enough energy for about one hour of daytime remote science."

Unfortunately that isn't much of an increase - but it at least allows some of the 'science' that many have longed to see.

One more item from THIS LINK - we ~could~ be sitting virtually in one small area for 8 months... maybe - some of that determined by lowered driving ability. Here's part of the text.

"We have to use care choosing the type of terrain we drive over," Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, a rover planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said about the challenge of five-wheel driving. In tests at JPL, the team has been practicing a maneuver to gain additional tilt by perching the left-front wheel on a basketball-size rock.

Spending eight months or so at Low Ridge Haven will offer time for many long-duration studies that members of the science team have been considering since early in the mission, said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator. These include detailed mapping of rocks and soils; in-depth determination of rock and soil composition; monitoring of clouds and other atmospheric changes; watching for subtle surface changes due to winds; and learning properties of the shallow subsurface by tracking surface-temperature changes over a span of months.

There is nothing wrong with Spirit being a sessile observer for a while. This will give us a chance to do a long-term observation of the aeolian processes that we've seen many signs of. Remember where Spirit was at Sol 90: between Bonneville and The Hills and very dusty. This trek has been miraculous.

In an ideal world, the right front wheel should have conked out while she was doing a survey on top of VonBraun, now that would be a heck of a view.

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